Take a break from the drudgery of kerning and go cross platform to the kitchen!

My recipe here shows how to render your own dough by converting simple flour, water and yeast to a rounded, lightweight mass. It tells how to generate a tasty tomato sauce – the default of all good pizza and a contrast to the topping – designed to your liking by fashioning your ingredients in an oblique style with a hint of spice. All sans a lot of effort. Don’t worry if you don’t get the lingo, you don’t have to be a typographer to master this recipe. — Martin

About Ode

Designer

Martin Wenzel

Ode is a pleasant and vibrant family in five weights with a strong personality. It’s equipped with every feature a good quality text typeface needs: ligatures, extended language support, and various figure sets.

The typical characteristics of broken script typefaces such as their formal rigidness, weighty appearance and archaic character shapes, limit their use in body text today. They are far less readable than say, Humanist typefaces.

With Ode I’ve tried to disprove this. A broken script typeface such as the Gothic script (textura) can be highly legible if the design is approached in a less orthodox way and solves the above issues that conflict with our ideas of legibility.

By replacing hard corners with round ones and giving the characters a more curvy and smoother overall design, the typically stern appearance of the typeface is greatly diminished, even with the ‘fracture’ of the counters still intact. My next step was to apply a very gentle slant and shift the weight within each letter slightly towards the top. Lastly, I replaced all Gothic script model characters which are unfamiliar to us with those of the humanist construction. These are compatible as both letter types are based on writing with the broad-nibbed pen.

If you want to find out more about Ode read my article about the development of this typeface on I Love Typography